Youth football conundrum not easy to tackle

Inside a large room on a far end of the local NFL team’s headquarters, a group of almost three dozen youth football leaders from around Southern California convened on a recent Saturday morning.

Instructed to introduce themselves and say something about what they hoped to gain from attending, the mothers and fathers and at least one grandmother took turns standing and speaking.

“I’m here to save our game,” said one woman.

“We have to keep football going for the future,” another man said.

Bassel Faltas, USA Football’s regional director for the western states, guided the discussion for the better part of four hours. And while the mood was largely upbeat and other issues such as parental over-exuberance and fundraising were discussed, there was an underlying gravity as the focus remained mostly on one topic.

Faltas emphasized that the sport they are helping shepherd is at a crossroads.

“This is a call to action,” he said to the group. “… What we’re trying to do is change the culture of football to more of a culture of safety.”

Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard, expressing his opinion in response to the league continually altering rules as part of its much-publicized effort to stem injuries — and particularly head trauma — created headlines during Super Bowl week by predicting there will not be an NFL 30 years from now.

In the weeks leading up to this past Super Bowl, President Barack Obama said in an interview that if he had a son he would think “long and hard” before letting him play football.

Moreover, in the past 16 months, two of the NFL’s biggest ambassadors have expressed concern about the viability of the game they love. Former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner said the idea of his two sons playing football “scares me.” Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman said if he had a son he wouldn’t discourage him from playing football but neither would he encourage him to do so.

And the father of Tom Brady, perhaps the game’s largest current icon, said last year that he would be “very hesitant” to let his son play if he had it to do over again.

All this, of course, is part of the backdrop of mounting concern over the long-term effects of playing football in the wake of the deaths of Junior Seau and other former NFL players being linked to repeated brain trauma.

The NFL faces lawsuits from thousands of former players who allege the league concealed what it knew about the danger of playing with concussions. It seems more former players come forward every day to talk about suffering from forms of dementia and depression Just a day after Pollard opined about the game’s future, his Ravens teammate Ed Reed, just 34 years old, acknowledged with a shrug that he experiences headaches and sometimes forgets where he is.

Amidst this scrutiny – not to mention a sudden six percent drop in youth football enrollment from 2011 to ’12 -- those running youth football are in what could fairly be described as crisis mode.